“If you’re an advanced user, add SageTV into your current Windows computer and throw away your VCR(s). If you bought a MCE system, download the trial version of SageTV and give it a try. Think about being able to add multiple hard drives for storage—and storing in standard mpeg formats, not proprietary Microsoft formats, too!”

Most of his points are pretty good. The long and the short of it with me are the file formats—Sage records in easy-to-manipulate MPEG2, while MCE does its own proprietary thing, with its own DRM formats.

MCE’s interface makes the SageTV interface eat hot death, though. I’m currently using an “MCE-like” “Skin” for Sage that helps a lot, but it’s not entirely perfect.

Last but not least, I go around and around with SageTV’s “Intelligent Recording” (ie: if you’re not doing anything else and have some disk space, record something I’d like) which isn’t very intellegent, repeatedly grabbing stuff that I’ve told it explicitly that I don’t like. Looking at the SageTV forum I’m far from alone in having this problem, so hopefully it will get addressed soon.

So, I’m still doing the SageTV thing. The picture quality is excellent, the formats are open, and I’m putting up with other issues hoping they’ll get fixed soon.